Reviews
The film often feels like a one-act play. It is foremost an experiment, in the same sense as Linda Rosenkrantz’s original mission to document the daily to-dos of her friends.
One Battle After Another unapologetically addresses the completely inexcusable injustices of contemporary American life while being incredibly funny, exciting, suspenseful, and poignant, particularly about the act of parenting a biracial child.
Johnson embodies this ethos from his shoulders to his thighs, but especially his eyes. When someone is on heroin, their eyes glaze over but do not defocus. It is not about the drowsy escape, it is the pleasure of balancing, for a moment, the mundane cruelties of life against an unstoppable contentment.
Where is the line between performance and reality when you are instructed to play yourself and not just any version, but your current version at the present moment? As the production progresses, the two men develop an independent friendship alongside their ideas about what this film is and how they should best live their lives.
The trouble with The History of Sound is not that its makers cannot imagine or depict these characters’ erotic bliss, however short-lived, in anything other than the most conservative terms, but that Hermanus, screenwriter Shattuck, and their leading men offer so little of conviction in its stead.
Anyone privileged enough not to work in the public-facing service economy was compelled to generate new at-home routines during the early days of COVID. More so than its (scant few) pandemic-set contemporaries, Suspended Time acutely understands how previously occupied mental space in adults became vacant for the first time.
The making of the play provides the dramatic scaffolding for the unfolding of life, but both the skit and the college life that surrounds it are presented as spontaneous, oblique, and devastating in their elisions.
Her first English-language feature, the film relinquishes some of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s steadily calamitous humor and Greek locales, while preserving her institutional critiques of capitalism and chauvinism.
Diciannove, the first film by Giovanni Tortorici, who is not yet out his twenties, speaks to the psychic undercurrents of our fresh Hell, while also carrying on a dialogue with the traditions of European romanticism in literature and film.
Like Pulse, the film’s conceit imagines a nightmare scenario in which an aspect of technologically modulated human interaction—here, online harassment—breaches the borders of reality.
Cohen suggests that modern cinema, unshackled from genre, is more powerful than we may give it credit for. His work is porous, holding room for all these possibilities and more.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is a passion project of the best kind, and not just because it features a part actors would give their right arm to play.
In case you did not see the other two films, 28 Years Later provides a quick refresher. Serving as audience surrogates, a living-room gathering of increasingly anxious children watch Teletubbies while all hell breaks loose outside. Only one of them makes it out alive.